


Motor Oil

by collectingstories



Category: The Walking Dead & Related Fandoms, The Walking Dead (TV)
Genre: Awkward Flirting, Daryl Dixon in Love, F/M, Fluff, Just all a bunch of fluff, and miscommunication
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-29
Updated: 2019-06-29
Packaged: 2020-05-30 20:11:58
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,612
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19410538
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/collectingstories/pseuds/collectingstories
Summary: Based on a request from Tumblr: Ok. So Daryl is mechanically inclined. What if he developed a crush on another person that was too. They’re friendly, but he is too shy to make a move. So like he knows that she has 2 spare tires so he makes a few accidents happen to them. Then she has to call him. Or like she can do the basics (oil changes/filter changes, tire changes and airing up) but not the more intricate stuff so he makes it so she has to come to him. And of course the more time they spend together they fall in loovvee.





	Motor Oil

“I swear to god-“ You cursed, slamming the door of the old Nissan. Rick opened the passenger’s side, leaning out the car as you popped the hood. “I just fucking fixed this.” 

“What’s the matter?” Rick asked, eyes scanning the empty road and the wildlife on either side. 

“This fucking engine…I just fixed it yesterday. It was driving fine.” Up ahead you heard the sound of Daryl’s motorcycle as it slowed and he did a u-turn on the vacant street before coming back. The three of you were on a run and he’d opted to take his bike instead of ride in the car with you and Rick. 

“Thought ya fixed that.” Daryl states, cutting the engine on his bike and getting off. 

“I did.” You snapped. 

“It’s still broke.” 

“No shit.” 

He crowded in next to you, forcing you to take a step back. Rick snorted and you shot him a look of annoyance over the hood of the car. You watched Daryl as best you could while he tinkered with the engine. “I did that.” You commented when he checked the oil.

“I’m doing it again.” He shrugged, “might’ve missed something.” 

“I know what I’m doing.” 

Daryl made a point of standing and looking around, watching Rick walk to the edge of the road and stab an oncoming walker, “I can tell.” 

“You’re a pain in my ass Dixon, and if you fix this fucking car just know I hate you.” 

“Least you’ll be alive to, not walker food on the side a the road.” He sassed back. 

In the months since losing the prison and finding Alexandria, Daryl’s demeanour had changed and you’d almost forgotten what a smartass he’d been in the beginning. Despite the annoyance you had for the situation it almost made you smile to hear his quip. 

“Can you fix it?” Rick asked, ignoring the argument. 

“Yeah, I can.”

“Whats that supposed to mean?” You asked, looking at Daryl who continued to work at the engine. 

“Means I can fix it and we ain’t stranded here.” He replied. 

“That’s not how you said it. You said it like ‘I can fix it and you couldn’t’.” 

“Anyone ever tell ya yer paranoid. Think yer spending too long in the sun.” Daryl remarked, continuing to work on the car. You walked over to the side of the road where Rick stood and took a seat in the grass, stretching your legs out in front of you. Rick looked like wanted to say something but he decided not to, instead surveying the area for any more walkers. 

Before the world went to shit you had been finishing up at a trade college near your hometown. You’d gone for mechanics, more interested in working with your hands then working behind a desk. Sometimes you wished you’d gone for something like nursing, something that would be more helpful in this new world. Though Rick and Daryl seemed to exist just fine without any particular skill set outside of your own. Alright so maybe you were far less skilled that Daryl but you knew just as much as him when it came to cars. But this was far from the first time you’d sworn to have fixed a car only to have it break down. 

“You know what?” You called, twisting to look back at Daryl. He hummed in response, not sparing too much interest to your newest idea, “I’m starting to think you’re sabotaging my cars!” 

There was a brief pause and you wondered if maybe he hadn’t heard you when he finally spoke up, “Why’d I do that?”

“I don’t know, you hate me? You want me to be stranded in the middle of nowhere and eaten?” 

“Ya really are paranoid.” Daryl replied. 

“Just fix the car you jerk.” You muttered.

In an attempt to defuse the situation Rick waved you over to the edge of the woods. “Does that look like a tent to you?” He asked, pointing to a spot in the distance where you could see a change in the coloring of the woods. It looked like some kind of tarp. 

“Might be a campsite.” You shrugged, unholstering your machete. You kept your gun at your hip, not wanting to fire in case it triggered more walkers.

“Daryl,” Rick hollered, catching his friend’s attention. “We’re going to check out this campsite. Might have some supplies left over.”

Daryl gave a nod of agreement and went back to his work. You followed Rick into the woods, looking back at Daryl briefly. Things had never been great between you and Daryl. You tended to mouth off to him, at first because he annoyed you always acting like he knew everything. Then it was just because you enjoyed annoying him. You liked the way he got flustered when you complimented something he did or what a cute face he made when you challenged something he said. Eventually you and Daryl found a rhythm that worked, a sort of friendship that was required to survive an apocalypse together. 

That changed after the prison fell and even though you had managed to find a place to stay and survive it didn’t seem like things between the two of you were getting better. Except that the cars you had been working on recently seemed to be breaking down, the same way they had when you were at the prison. 

Rick waved for your attention and you watched as he signaled to let you know his next actions. Daryl was better at understanding Rick’s hand motions, the two of them could have an entire conversation just by looking at each other. While you weren’t quite so well versed you knew basically what he was trying to say. He wanted you to take one side of the tent and he would check the other side.

“It’s zipped.” You whispered, as you came around the front while Rick checked the back. There was a cooler and some clothing hanging on a line behind the tent. 

“Careful.” He cautioned as you reached out for the zipper. 

The next few seconds were a blur. You heard Rick say something about walkers but you were too distracted by the one that lunged at you as soon as the zipper was down enough. It took the whole tent with it, skin getting caught in the metal zipper and dragging off of it’s body as it reached it’s hands to you. Despite Rick’s warning you were still taken by surprise. You tried to back away from it but you lost your footing, falling onto your back as the walker and the tent landed on your lower half. The grip on your machete was lost and Rick was trying to fight off a small group that had appeared from behind the clothesline, drawn by the smell of you and him no doubt. You tried to kick away from it, one foot going through his chest while the other only hit dirt. 

You were preparing for the bite it was definitely about to take out of your thigh when an arrow pierced it’s skull and it fell, limp on your lower body. Daryl was already loading another arrow to shoot at the three that Rick was fighting off as you wormed your way out of the grasp of the dead walker. 

“You alright?” Rick asked, when the three were put down and it appeared no others were there to feast. 

“I’m fine.”

“Yer stupid is what ya are, coulda gotten yerself killed.” Daryl retorted, grabbing his arrow out of the walker’s skull and heading back toward the car.

“Well I wasn’t expecting something to jump out of that tent at me was I?” You replied, following after him. 

“And why were ya looking at the tent in the first place? Cause the car broke down and you can’t sit still for a minute.” 

“I fixed that car! It was working perfectly!”

“I can tell.” 

“Hey,” Rick cut in, “I suggested we check out the tent and, if the car is fixed, I would suggest that we get the hell out of here.” 

“Fine by me.” Daryl replied, already heading for his bike. You got in the passenger side of the car, slamming the door shut. You were pissed, mostly at yourself. Walkers were a given in this world but you had managed to hold your own most of the time. The few times you didn’t though, Daryl was always the first to reprimand you over it. Telling you that you needed to be more careful, or not stupid, or not reckless, or anything else he decided that you were being. It was why you and he had clashed so much in the beginning. It was his own way of showing that he cared about you and he knew that now but it still served to piss you off just as much as it had the first time. 

The rest of the run was easy enough and once you were back in Alexandria you went your separate ways. Daryl was quiet though not usually so. He was typically a pretty reserved person, more and more so as time went on and circumstances worsened. Though this time his quietness seemed like something else. You were worried he was still angry with you for the walker attack and, though you stood by your claim of having fixed the car, you knew that if the car had actually been fixed you never would’ve needed Daryl to save you from a walker. 

Once everything was settled and you’d gone through all of the scavenged items with Olivia you decided to find Daryl. Maybe apologize. You didn’t want things to regress back to the beginning when he was always pissed at you and you were always annoyed with him. Daryl was exactly where you thought he’d be, on the porch of one of the houses that Deanna had given your group to stay in.

“Hey,” you greeted, walking up the stairs and taking a seat next to Daryl. “I wanted to say thanks for today and I’m sorry about what happened.” 

“Ya should be more careful.” He shrugged.

“I really thought I fixed the car. I mean, Aaron and I test drove it just the other day and it was working perfectly fine. I wouldn’t have suggested we drove it if I thought it would break down.” You replied. 

Daryl chewed on his lower lip, biting over a small cut there. He hadn’t spoken to you after he flipped out because he felt guilty. How could he yell at you over not fixing a car when it was his fault it had broken down in the middle of the street. “Ain’t yer fault.”

“It is, if the car didn’t break down I wouldn’t have been almost bitten. You were right, I was stupid.” 

“Nah ya weren’t. It’s just the way shit is now.” 

“Maybe but I should’ve been more careful-”

“I said it wasn’t yer fault, it wasn’t yer fault. Stop talkin’ about it.” Daryl snapped, annoyed that you kept mentioning the car. 

“I’m just trying to apologize, you don’t have to be a dick.” 

“Ya don’t have ta apologize.” He replied, “I told ya it wasn’t yer fault.”

“Except it was because I was supposed to fix the car and I didn’t-”

“Ya did fix it.” He finally admitted, annoyed into the confession by your guilt over almost getting bitten. “It was my fault that ya were in the woods with Rick.”

“That doesn’t make any sense Daryl…unless-” you paused, realization dawning on your face as you sat there. “oh my god. You did sabotage the car!”

“I didn’t sabotage it.” He grumbled, looking absolutely done with the conversation. 

“But it was fixed.”

“Yea.”

“And then you unfixed it and it broke down.”

Daryl looked away from you, chewing on his lip again. You took that as his own version of yes. He didn’t want to call it sabotage but he had messed with your car after you fixed it, stranding you and Rick. 

“Why?” You asked.

He only shrugged.

“I mean, why would you do that? What if something happened. I mean something almost did happen!” You got off the stairs and Daryl followed suit, standing in front of you on the small lawn, catching you from walking off. “I don’t get why you would want something to happen to me.” 

“It’s not like that.” Daryl hadn’t necessarily thought his plan all the way through. Or at all. 

The first time it had happened had been an accident. Something had truly gone wrong when you were trying to fix one of the old transport vans at the prison and you had begrudgingly asked for Daryl’s help. He found that he enjoyed spending time with you but he wasn’t quite sure how to vocalise that. He didn’t know how to tell you that he wanted to spend more time with you so he settled for finding ways to force it. You knew a lot about cars but there were somethings that you were still a novice about so he took to sabotaging a couple of cars. Whenever you worked on one he made sure it was still malfunctioning, enough that you’d have to ask him for help. He was embarrassed, both that he couldn’t just talk to you and that he even liked you in the first place so he always acted like he was annoyed when you asked. But really he wasn’t, far from annoyed, he craved spending time with you. This, today, was supposed to be something routine. It wasn’t supposed to end with you nearly being bit by a walker. 

“Then what’s it like because I was nearly walker lunch.” 

There was a pause as Daryl stared at the ground, chewing on his bottom lip and trying to make the cut there bleed again if only to distract him from the way his throat was closing up and his stomach was twisting. He wasn’t good at this, opening up. “Just wanted to spend time with ya.”

“What?” Your eyes went wide and you were sure that sometime between walking up to the house and now you must’ve lost your hearing.

“I ain’t saying it again.”

“I didn’t hear you.” You replied, smiling at the way his ears went red.

“I like spending time with ya alright? I didn’t mean for ya ta…I didn’t want that ta happen. Just like being around ya.” 

“Why didn’t you just say so?” 

“I ain’t good at that shit.” Daryl replied, looking defensive. Now that you knew he worried you’d make fun of him for it. He was stupid to even tell you. “Don’t matter anyway. I shouldn’t a said anything.”

“I’m glad you did,” you said before he could turn away from you. Now you were the one trying to keep him from leaving.

“Yeah?”

“Well for one, I was pretty heartbroken thinking you wanted me to be walker-food. But also, I like spending time with you too Daryl.” You smiled. 

He looked away but you caught the smile on his face before he had time to hide it. 

“Will you show me how you fixed the car earlier?” 

“Woulda showed ya when we were on the road but ya insisted on walking off looking for trouble.” He said, already starting to walk toward the car. 

You couldn’t help but laugh, “if I’d known you were doing some crazy post-apocalypse flirting I would’ve.”

“I wasn’t flirtin’ with ya.”

“Okay.” You smiled.

“I wasn’t.” He insisted, though he smiled at you again. Twice in a matter of minutes must’ve been some kind of record. Especially these days.


End file.
